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Abstract
József Lengyel (1896–1975), a Hungarian short story writer, could compare European and other landscapes based on personal experience, since he had to spend 18 years in Siberia in Stalin’s Gulag. He wrote a short story cycle, in which the relation of man and nature, the experience of an extreme climate, and the peculiarities of the Siberian landscape are central themes. What people were doing there, was a struggle, partly for survival, partly for the transformation of nature into something “useful” to man, or at least suitable for human life. This authentic representation of a non-European environment, which is unique in Hungarian literature, will be compared in this paper with the short stories by István Tömörkény (1866–1917), who in some hundreds of ethnographic short stories described the life of miserable peasants on the Great Hungarian Plain, i.e., activities that Lengyel described as “beautifying the land.” In both oeuvres nature tends to appear as an enemy, which is sometimes indomitable, sometimes to be defeated by all means. The representation of indomitable nature performs the environmental sublime, while fighting nature appears as an attitude, which is highly problematic in retrospect. The ethos of environmental devastation makes such literature uncomfortable reading in an age of possible global environmental catastrophes; but the continuous fight with nature means a continuous coexistence with nature at the same time, i.e., a continuous realization of the dependence of human existence on the environment, a realization that can be useful now, when human beings try to live in the illusion of a possible separation from nature.
Studies on literary translation are traditionally product-oriented. This paper is based on the assumption that recent research tools such as keylogging and verbal reports may help us gain new insights into the practice of literary translation by closely monitoring the process. It presents some preliminary findings of an empirical study in which four professional literary translators translated a short story by Ernest Hemingway into German. The translators registered their writing process with Translog and recorded their concurrent/retrospective verbalizations in the authentic working context. For the purpose of this paper, two short excerpts from the story have been selected to examine the four translators’ decision-making processes, dealing with repetition as an element of style and ambiguity as one of the basic characteristics of literary writing. In particular, this paper attempts to trace the emergence of the translator’s voice in the target text and explore the translator’s agency in the process. The empirical data shows that both are closely linked to the translator’s attitude towards the task and the view a translator has of his/her own role and the role he/she attributes to the author and the text’s stylistic features. Obviously, these factors also have a bearing on the use of strategies such as explicitation or avoidance of repetition.
Chinese short stories and novels differ greatly from their European counterparts. The birth of the Chinese story is closely linked to the development of the Chinese commercial cities, in which their authors, audience and typical figures lived. Historical themes occur frequently, but the real heroes of the stories are people living on the periphery of society: merchants, thieves, and other city-dwellers. The imperial court and high officials only play a limited role. Young scholars and failed examination candidates, on the other hand, make a frequent appearance. The authors of most stories are unknown to us, as the stories have developed for centuries, and their written versions were compiled relatively lately, centuries after the emergence of the original story cycles.
The heroine of Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin, Tatyana became the prototype of a brilliant series of female characters in 19th-century Russian literature. Various interpretations of her image can be grouped around an idealizing pole (Dostoevsky: “apotheosis of the Russian woman”) and a realistic one (Belinsky regarding the figure in her evolution from an ardent but naive provincial damsel to a dame of the Muscovite high society). Chekhov narrates in his short story После театра [After the theatre] about a 16-year-old girl Nadya, who, having returned home from the performance of the opera Eugene Onegin, and effected by Tatyana’s writing to Onegin, starts to write a letter to a young man, who, as she thinks, is in love with her; then, suddenly she decides to write to another young man who also pays court to her. At the same time, she experiences rapid changes of her mood: she bursts out now into tears, now into laughter without any real reason; and gradually, she becomes filled with an incomprehensible feeling of joy. Chekhov, who was not only a sensitive writer but also a sharp-sighted physician, reliably describes in Nadya’s behaviour the psycho-somatic symptoms of early puberty when the estrogenic hormones come into action. The undercurrent of this story is apparently a delicate ironical hint at Tatyana’s juvenile rapture over Onegin. Chekhov does not deglorify Pushkin’s heroine, he just supplements her realistic interpretation with the psycho-physiological aspect of the formation of her personality.
Every student of Ligeti's life and work is familiar with his recollection about the short story by Gyula Krúdy that he cited as a source of inspiration for what has come to be called his meccanico style. The two versions of this recollection – one
Paradigmatska povijesna pripovijest Mirko Bogovića
Ubojstvo na Grebengradu
The author examines the anti-Habsburg attitude and the system of pro-Hungarian motives in Bogović’s short stories written during the epoch of Absolutism on the basis of the short story Ubojstvo na Grebengradu .
Abstract
What do Dezső Kosztolányi and Jorge Luis Borges have in a common ? There are both short stories’ writers and translators who wrote essays on the art of the translation. Moreover they tried to put the problems of translation into fictions. We propose first to study the different translation theories of these two authors. The second point concerns the analysis of two short stories: “Gallus” from Kosztolányi’s Kornél Esti cycle and “El enigma de Edward Fitzgerald” from Borges’ complete works because Gallus and Fitzgerald, the main characters, are translators; in fact, the thought of translation is not only present in the theory, but could be elaborated through fictional texts.
